The Legacy of Giorgio Armani: Fashion Heritage between Intellectual Property Rights and Cultural Heritage Law
This is Part I of a two-part series. Part II is here.
On Sunday, September 28th, the last day of Milan Fashion Week, global celebrities, members of Milanese society and the Italian fashion industry, and throngs of everyday people, gathered in Milan’s Brera district outside of one of Italy’s most celebrated museums, the Pinacoteca di Brera. There to watch the Spring/Summer 2026 Giorgio Armani fashion show, the last presentation completely designed and imagined by the brand’s founder, Mr. Armani, before his unexpected death a few weeks earlier, the crowd and attendees could feel that they were part of a cultural moment. Indeed, the fashion show was not the only event dedicated to Mr. Armani in the museum. As models walked a runway in the museum’s courtyard, still other Armani fashion was exhibited within the museums’ galleries next to Renaissance paintings and later 19th century masterpieces, like Francesco Hayez’s The Kiss. Giorgio Armani. Milano, per amore, the first fashion exhibition within the museum’s galleries, allows Mr. Armani’s fashion to pervade the Pinacoteca, an autonomous Italian state museum under Italian law meant to preserve and valorize parts of our cultural heritage.
An image of a model in Armani’s Spring/Summer 2026 fashion show
An image of an Armani look in the museum’s galleries
Originally planned to celebrate the Armani brand’s 50th anniversary, the retrospective of Armani’s fashion in the Pinacoteca and the Spring/Summer 2026 Armani fashion show hosted by the brand in the museum’s courtyard have a new meaning after Mr. Armani’s death. Along with the decisions Mr. Armani made in his will, the brand’s fashion show and the museum exhibition offer examples for fashion designers eager to control their own fashion legacy in a space between intellectual property rights’ incentives to create and cultural heritage law’s preservation ethos.
In the first part of this post reflecting on what we can learn from Mr. Armani’s choices shortly before his death, I highlight how the Armani fashion show indicates how Mr. Armani controlled his fashion heritage alongside of and beyond the brand’s intellectual property rights in the fashion he created. In the second part of the post, I spotlight how Mr. Armani’s decision to display his fashion creations in the Pinacoteca and in other museum venues was part of a strategy to bypass Italian cultural heritage law’s protectionist ethos, offering the designer and his brand control over the cultural narrative surrounding Armani fashion for the future.
Giorgio Armani’s fashion continues to live on a frontier that is defined by business activities, cultural endeavors, and legal rights that defy the boundaries we traditionally identify with intellectual property law and cultural heritage law. Understanding how this frontier operates through the Armani case study is one way to imagine how fashion designers, and their eponymous brands, may decide to preserve and perpetuate their fashion and its cultural relevance in the future.
